Artists Of The Dark Zone

Deciphering Cherokee ritual imagery deep in the caves of the American South

- Will Hunt

On a spring afternoon in 2017, archaeologist Jan Simek led a group of graduate students into the dark, wet mouth of a Tennessee cave. They slipped past cave crickets and ducked under a colony of bats clinging to the ceiling. When they came to the end of the passage, the group belly-crawled through a crack in a wall and emerged in a small chamber. Simek angled his headlamp over the chamber’s walls to reveal hundreds of strange images carved into the stone: a serpent with antlers, a mud wasp with delicate wings, an entire flock of birds that seemed to soar across the wall. The images had been engraved by Native Americans 1,200 years earlier, during what archaeologists call the Woodland period (1000 b.c.–a.d. 1100), when hunter-gatherers were beginning to settle into an agricultural lifestyle. When the group eventually retreated toward the exit, one of Simek’s students, a tall, quiet man named Beau Duke Carroll, lingered in the chamber. He was staring at a small carved figure of a man with wings and a sharp beak. Carroll is Cherokee, a member of the Eastern Band born and raised on Cherokee-owned territory in North Carolina. His ancestors once called this part of Tennessee home. Carroll pulled from his pocket a pouch of tobacco that had been consecrated by Cherokee elders and sprinkled it over the cave floor, then he turned and crawled back out.